Right now, you can buy a dollar's worth of gold for about 36 cents.

That sounds impossible. Here's how it's real.

The major gold miners are throwing off record cash flow — even after gold's recent pullback. The four largest have never had this much free cash on hand. Ever. At today's gold price, they're running margins as high as 75% — the most profitable they have ever been.

Which hands them a problem.

Go here to see the problem — and why the majors are about to go on a shopping spree for the ages.

When a major gold miner makes record profits, it does one of two things: hand the cash back to shareholders, or buy the best junior mining assets to secure future production.

And here's the piece the market is missing:

The best junior assets are still priced as if gold were stuck at $1,800 an ounce — not north of $4,000, where it trades today.

So the majors are staring at their own future production shrinking, sitting on record cash, looking at top-tier junior assets trading at a fraction of what that gold is worth at today's price.

They don't have a choice. They buy — or their output keeps shrinking until they're out of business.

That's how you buy a dollar of gold for 36 cents: you own the junior before the major is forced to pay up for it.

The gap between what these assets are worth and what they trade for has a name. I call it the Golden Anomaly. It only appears early in a gold bull market, and it closes fast — usually the moment the majors start writing cheques.

So you can pay full price after the gap closes…

Or buy the dollar for 36 cents while the Anomaly still exists.

My name is Garrett Goggin, CFA, CMT, and it's why Porter Stansberry recently called me:

"THE most knowledgeable gold investor in the world."

Go here to see my Golden Anomaly portfolio — and the three names next on the majors' shopping list.

Best,

Garrett Goggin, CFA, CMT
Lead Analyst and Founder, Golden Portfolio

Sandisk’s Margins Look Like Software. Can They Last?

Author: Sam Quirke. Published: 8/14/2026.

As with death and taxes, there are two inalienable truths in investing: hardware businesses earn thin margins and software businesses earn fat ones. Making physical things is costly, while selling code that can be copied endlessly is, comparatively speaking, not.

Every so often, though, a company scrambles that neat distinction, and few are doing it more clearly than SanDisk Corporation (NASDAQ: SNDK). The maker of physical flash memory chips recently posted margin numbers that look almost too good for its industry.

Thanks in large part to revenue soaring more than 370% in its earnings report earlier this month, SanDisk’s gross margins hit 85%. For context, that’s higher than the 78% gross margin reported by software giant Salesforce Inc (NYSE: CRM), which doesn’t physically manufacture so much as a paperclip.

That combination of explosive growth and software-like margins is extraordinarily rare in hardware, and it raises a tantalizing question: Has SanDisk stumbled onto one of the most profitable growth stories in the entire technology sector, and if so, can it last?

A Margin Profile That Defies the Category

To appreciate how unusual SanDisk’s profitability is, it helps to compare it with that of its peers. Traditional storage rivals like Western Digital Corporation (NASDAQ: WDC) and Seagate Technology (NASDAQ: STX) typically report gross margins in the 40% to 50% range, while the broader hardware sector often posts much lower figures.

With margins at 85%, SanDisk is in a different league entirely, which helps explain why its stock is up 540% for the year, compared with gains of 180% for Western Digital and 230% for Seagate.

The Secret Behind the Software-Like Economics

The driver behind these dream-like margins is how SanDisk sells its products. Rather than relying on the notoriously volatile spot market for memory, where prices swing wildly with supply and demand, the company has been locking its biggest customers into multiyear, largely fixed-price contracts.

These agreements have transformed the business. SanDisk now has tens of billions of dollars in minimum contracted revenue stretching years into the future, covering a large portion of its expected output. That gives it something the memory industry has often sought but rarely received: predictable, annuity-like revenue that behaves more like a software subscription than a one-time sale.

Underpinning it all is the voracious appetite for storage created by the artificial intelligence (AI) boom. Demand for memory continues to outstrip supply, and that imbalance is expected to persist, giving SanDisk the pricing power to sign these lucrative deals in the first place.

Wall Street Is Taking Notice

That transformation has not been lost on the analyst community. Argus recently upgraded its rating on SanDisk to a Buy, assigning a hefty $1,600 price target to the stock after the recent bout of profit-taking left the shares looking heavily oversold.

The team pointed to accelerating demand, the company’s leadership in NAND flash memory and its push deeper into the lucrative data center market as reasons to expect those enviable margins to keep expanding.

Why the Bears Are Not Buying It

For all the excitement, some investors still urge caution. The most pointed concern is that those same fixed-price contracts, so prized for their visibility, may also cap how much higher margins can climb. Indeed, the company’s own guidance for the current quarter implies that margins will hold steady or even tick down slightly from their recent peak.

A second worry centers on how SanDisk got there. The bears note that much of the surge came from rising prices rather than from shipping substantially more product, and price-led booms tend to fade once a shortage eases. Demonstrating durable growth in actual volumes, they argue, is the real test of whether these margins can endure.

Where the Real Test Lies

So which side has it right? Bulls and bears are looking at the same eye-watering numbers and drawing opposite conclusions about what they mean for the stock. It’s easy to get excited about the bulls’ argument and embrace the structural shift taking place, with contracted revenue and AI-driven demand turning a cyclical business into something steadier. However, the bears’ view that this is a price-driven spike destined to fade is hard to ignore.

The share price reflects that uncertainty. While SanDisk shares are up more than 540% so far this year, the ride has been anything but smooth. The stock fell more than 50% during an industry-wide sell-off in July before rebounding almost 40% over the past fortnight.

In many ways, that kind of volatility is to be expected for a stock whose future is so hotly contested, and anyone thinking about getting involved needs to be ready for more periods like it.